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Remember the Noughties, when Facebook was a relatively new phenomenon? Before Twitter had exploded, before Pinterest and Instagram even existed? Back in the ‘dark ages’, the newspapers and the rumour mill were rife with stories of people being sacked or rejected because of drunken exploits posted to their Facebook profile. While the importance of shielding your boss from the image of you half-naked with your head down a toilet can never be overstated, the role of social media in defining who you are has since changed for the better. Now, instead of hiding our social lives and interests from our colleagues and potential employers, we put them online for all to see. Clearly, this strategy is paying off: more and more people are using social media to obtain a job (or a better job), and recent studies have found that up to 82% of recruiters have hired employees via LinkedIn. While this is far less true of other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, in my opinion it’s only a matter of time.

So, how can you make the most of social media, demonstrating your skills, qualities and to colleagues, potential employers and the world? The answer is to dive head first into as many channels as possible, whilst unifying your content in the form of a consistent personal brand. This post outlines ways that you can make the most of the tools available to present your social media activity as a united front.

Keep it consistent.Make it easy for others to find you by using the same username for everything. This is worthwhile not only because it makes it easy to tell if a profile belongs to you, but if your username is relatively unique then it’s also good for SEO, enabling others to use Google to find a cross-section of your social media activity. Another consideration is whether you use the same photo everywhere – you might want a professional headshot for LinkedIn, for example – but, even if you choose different photos to match each site’s tone, make sure that they are all recognisable as you.

Embrace multiple platforms.These days it’s not enough to use just one or two social platforms; the more sites you use, the better. It’s good to be aware of the limitations of each platform; there’s only so much you can say in 140 characters or less, and LinkedIn pages tend to be rather dull, so mix it up a bit with multimedia content and full-length writing. Additional networks to consider include Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and even Foursquare. If you have a flair for writing, then a WordPress/Blogger blog is always a worthwhile investment. Basically, try as many as you can and see what works best for you.

Break down boundaries.Using multiple platforms is all well and good, but you can get maximum benefit by cross-promoting your activities between sites. Obvious examples include sharing blog posts to Twitter, posting Instagram photos to your Facebook Timeline and (before it was killed off), auto-posting your Tweets to LinkedIn. But don’t be afraid to think outside the box: if you think a recent blog post is relevant to your LinkedIn contacts, make sure you’re sharing it there too. The same might be true of photos from a recent conference, or a particularly insightful Pinterest pin.

Be wary of auto-sharing.
While it’s important to take people from one platform to another as much as possible, don’t overdo it. As a general rule, don’t enable auto-sharing functionality. A prominent example of this particular faux pas is the automatic sharing of truncated Facebook posts to Twitter: a lot of Facebook content is simply too long-winded to be posted on Twitter, and users will be reluctant to click a link simply to read the end of a sentence. The key thing here is to give people a strong reason to follow you in more than one place, and you can do this by manually varying what you do and don’t share between networks. In other words, use your common sense; ask yourself whether a post on one site will transfer well to another, and weigh up the chances of your followers seeing the same thing twice before deciding to share it elsewhere.

Don’t be an egomaniac.This one’s perhaps rather obvious, but make sure not to talk about yourself all the time. Sharing content created by others is a good way of demonstrating what ideals you aspire to, and in any case social media is about connecting with others and the discovery of new ideas. It’s very tempting to shout from the rooftops about your own skills and achievements, but you should never forget your place in the world.

Content is everything.The final thing I want to note in this post is the importance of quality over quantity. Never post just for the sake of it, and always consider what you’re contributing to the conversation before you decide to share. In the eyes of a recruiter it’s much more advantageous to have fewer posts that are highly relevant than to have too many posts that have been made indiscriminately or without much thought.

What are your tips for creating a unified personal brand? Do you have any innovative ways of working across social media platforms? Let me know in the comments, or as always you can send me a Tweet!